


if you've got your systems i'll tear down these walls

by nagia



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, kinkmeme fill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-09
Packaged: 2017-11-01 17:32:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's more than one way to skin a cat, and Shepard promised Garrus he'd never be alone.  A "fix-it" fic for the ending.  MASS EFFECT 3 SPOILERS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you've got your systems i'll tear down these walls

She can see, but she can't move. Can't move her head to change her angle of view, can't even move her eyes to adjust her focus.

She can feel the keeper's unnaturally smooth walk, but she can't stand on her own. Shepard can't even open her mouth to tell it to take her somewhere impossible to miss.

It seems intent on carrying her to obey the final instruction of the Catalyst. All she can do is let it and watch as the ever-changing part of the Citadel gradually settles into something more familiar. Something with stable walls.

The keeper props her up against a bench on Docking Bay D-24. If she could, she'd close her eyes.

* * *

"You'll never be alone," she says, and Garrus hears the undercurrent of something strange in her voice. It sounds... wet, almost?

He believes it, mind and body and spirit. He doesn't believe a word.

It hurts.

"Never," he says.

* * *

It's excuciating. Shepard has never hurt like this. Electricity and biotic energies swarm and crawl all over her, whip-cracking violet and white and gold into the air. She can't even scream; she has no time to spare from her grip or the vast, rolling ocean that stretches out beneath her mind.

She doesn't let go. Instead, she uses the trick Samara taught her. She excites every biotic node she has, uses the tingling biotic energy to shunt the electricity from her arm to her kinetic barriers.

And she stands in the shallows of the ocean, pushing with all she can spare, and tells it to move.

* * *

The gun blossoms like a flower, like a fire. Red as the apples Shepard likes to eat. So Garrus rams into Tali from behind, his shoulder striking hers. They end up knotted and tangled behind a concrete slab and the wreckage of a Mako.

The world flares red and orange and then white, with a blue undertinge. Then he goes blind. The broken asphalt in front of the Mako hisses and pops. Then he stops hearing.

When he can see again, there's no sign of Shepard, and Coats is making the universal sign for 'fall the hell back.'

* * *

"The paths are open," the Catalyst says. His eyes glint with something hard, something distinctly un-childlike. Hell, un- _living_.

"I'm not taking them," she says.

The Catalyst merely looks at her, expression knowing and superior and unknowable. And distinctly unimpressed.

"Why should we lose everything?"

"Why should you have had it in the first place?"

And that settles her. She staggers toward the left. More than one way to skin a cat.

* * *

Hackett plays the hail for the squad to hear:

Her first words are, "What do you need me to do?" Which is such a Shepard reaction that it hurts. Never alone. He should be beside her.

Her last words are: "I can't see," Shepard says. "I don't know how..."

No. Not her last words. After that, she makes a muffled noise. His translator thinks it could be either a nonstandard means of saying "blunted everything," in English or a batarian word for a kind of tree.

And then nothing.

* * *

She wakes to Hackett's voice, stumbling forward out of instinct. But she can't reach the control panel, can't even make herself stand anymore.

Dying is exquisitely familiar.

She closes her eyes — and opens them again, to find her own private ghost staring down at her.

"Delial?"

* * *

Ten minutes later, the first Reaper begins to malunction. They watch its glowing orange lights flicker. The entire machine shudders. And then the lights wink out, one by one.

Then it rises. Up and up and up, with its red laser-eye closed. In the distance, other lights rise, too. They soar up to the boundaries of his sight; then they go beyond and are invisible.

Moments after that, EDI's eyes go distant. "You may find this difficult to believe, but the Reaper fleet is retreating."

Massani ejects a thermal clip and jams in a new one. Off the Normandy, he's always been too angry with his guns. It seems somehow worse right now. "Guddamn right I don't believe it."

And that's when Joker hails them. The word spreads through the chain of command after that. Even hiding in a blasted out concrete box, he hears the first low rumblings of a ragged cheer.


End file.
